blog musings by Mark J. Welch

All year, I’ve been doing battle with a never-ending series of aggressive fraudsters who use AdSense ads across many dot-tk (.tk) domains which each generate small numbers of cheap fraudulent clicks, siphoning money from any campaign which has Automatic Placements enabled.

Why does it work? It works because Google AdWords refuses to enable exclusion of placements (web sites) based on Top Level Domain (TLD). Read more »

This just seems creepy and wrong: Google (AdWords) allows advertisers to create Search ads which pre-fill forms with Google Account data. In this example, my email was pre-filled next to a “subscribe” button which doesn’t say what I’d be subscribing to — alongside a completely meaningless “Privacy” link which doesn’t disclose how the email address would be used. Read more »

GTmetrix.com is an awesome web site: it analyzes your web site and provides detailed suggestions for how to improve the page-load time; this is incredibly useful when trying to diagnose the issue, “why is my web site loading to slowly?”

Note that there are multiple tabs with information: make sure to click on the “YSlow” and “Timeline” tabs to see more information.

Here are screen shots showing the information for this site (markwelchblog.com). Read more »

While reading Internet Retailer’s December 2012 profile of its chosen “Top 100″ ecommerce web sites (http://www.internetretailer.com/2012/11/30/going-extra-mile), I was confused by its “Speed” ratings for the sites. Each web site was evaluated based on its page-load time, and 33 of the 100 sites were rated “unacceptable.”

The idea that many web sites succeed despite slow load times isn’t a surprise. What confused me was the scale used by Internet Retailer in assigning its speed ratings: Read more »